Noted combines social media and digital smarts for better music discovery

When This Is My Jam shut down last year, its absence was felt by many despite the proliferation of music discovery on the Web. Noted is a new take on this type of social music discovery service, put together by friends who weren’t happy with how difficult it was to share music among themselves. The service aims to combine the best of social discovery and algorithm-based discovery, adding what it refers to as a “secret sauce” to better learn listeners’ tastes.

While Noted certainly seems capable of filling the void left by This Is My Jam, the service wasn’t explicitly created with that in mind. In fact, when it was created, co-founders Ben Hewitt and Tim Welch were simply doing it for themselves, and the site had a different name, Nusiki.

“Nusiki was very personal for us. I worked in Nairobi, Kenya and it was a play on the Swahili word for music,” Hewitt told Digital Trends. “We started out building this for ourselves, but as we’ve grown, it’s become about more than that. So we wanted something to reflect this next phase and be more inclusive to our growing community. Noted plays off of music (musical note) and the fact that your music taste is being heard while you’re here.”

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As the company puts it, social media is great for sharing a lot of different types of things, but since so few services have built-in music functionality, music isn’t one of them. Even the most social music services don’t make sharing with your friends an easy process either. Noted aims to effectively staple those two worlds together, and to do so in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.

The app boasts integration with both SoundCloud and YouTube, instantly giving access to a huge library of songs to share and build playlists from. For those more interested in sharing music, posting is easy, but the real depth lies in the discovery. While Noted will learn your tastes, it’s also a great tool for stepping outside of your own musical boundaries — simply head to the Explore section, tap something unfamiliar-looking, and see where you end up.

While much of the tech behind Noted’s discoveries is suggestive of a more social Pandora, it is also a full-fledged social network. At the time of this writing, songs from A Tribe Called Quest are trending in tribute to Malik Taylor – aka Phife Dawg – who died yesterday. These types of musical conversations are the exact sort of thing this type of service excels at.

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